Mending A Reflection, Julie Heffernan,

Rowan University Art Gallery

Rowan University Art Gallery is pleased to present Mending A Reflection, a solo exhibition of Julie Heffernan’s self-portraits, curated by Mary Salvante, Director of Rowan University Art Gallery.

The exhibit will be on view September 3 to October 26, 2019, with an artist talk and opening reception on September 12, from 5 – 7:30 pm. Artist talk begins at 5 pm with a reception immediately following.

Mending a Reflectionaddresses the connection between culture, mass media and personal identity through the eyes of one central female figure. Through her self-portraiture, Heffernan investigates what she calls the “shared collective unconscious,” exploring the historical narratives and subliminal imagery that work to shape who we are and how we perceive the world around us.

Self Portrait with Daughters, Julie Heffernan

In 2019, Heffernan revised many of her self-portraits, including Self-Portrait with Daughters, Self-Portrait After Galilee, Self-Portrait with Shipwreck, Self-Portrait as Wrangler, Self-Portrait as Two-Headed Princess, and Self Portrait as Hothead. These newly updated paintings will be exhibited for the first time publicly in Mending a Reflection.

Heffernan’s paintings help us understand how media can influence our behavior and manipulate our perspective. In her large-scale vibrant works, she pays homage to many powerful women by including them in her portraits. Taking inspiration from women activists like Anita Hill and Tarana Burke, Heffernan confronts this bias by presenting what she calls a “different sort of self-portrait,” one full of female spirit, “giving voices to women who have been silenced for too many years by the dominant culture.”

Self Portrait as Wrangler, Julie Heffernan

ABOUT JULIE HEFFERNANJulie Heffernan has been exhibiting her paintings nationally and internationally since 1988 and is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. She has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including at PPOW in NYC entitled Hunter Gatherer (2019); the Crocker Art Museum, Palmer Art Museum and Michael Haas Gallery in Berlin; and a museum show entitled When The Water Rises originating at the LSU Museum of Art in Baton Rouge and traveling to museums in California, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas through 2019. She has participated in numerous group shows at major galleries and museums including the Museum für Moderne Kunst, in Bremen, Germany; Me Museum, Olbricht Collection in Berlin; the Palazzo Reale in Milan, Italy; and in Environmental Impact exhibition traveling to 12 museums throughout the United States.

Heffernan is the recipient of such prestigious grants as the NEA, NYFA and Fulbright, as well as a PS1 Artist-in-Residence, and her work has been reviewed by major newspapers and magazines including The New York Times and The New Yorker. Her work is in numerous museums throughout the country including the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond, VA. She is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

ABOUT ROWAN UNIVERSITY ART GALLERYRowan University Art Gallery serves as a premier cultural destination for South Jersey, the Rowan community, and surrounding region. Our mission is to provide a platform for discourse on best practices in contemporary art by professional artists, curators, and scholars through the presentation of interdisciplinary art exhibitions, panel discussions, guest curatorial projects, and other public programming.

The Gallery has a history of programming that recognizes the achievements of women in the visual arts. Important past group exhibitions include The Sister Chapel: An Essential Feminist Collaboration (2016) and Groundbreaking: The Women of the Sylvia Sleigh Collection (2011). The gallery also hosted Better Than Ever: Women Figurative Artists of the ’70s Co-ops (2009), a traveling exhibition that was curated by Sharyn Finnegan, Between the Threads: A Feminist Guide to the Domestic (2016), and Enamored Armor (2018). Solo exhibitions have included Beverly Semmes (2011), Joyce Kozloff (2014), Jeanie Jaffe (2015), Diane Burko (2018), and Ebony G. Patterson (2019).

Support for programming at Rowan University Art Gallery is also made possible by funds from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. For more information please visit: rowan.edu/artgallery

Nature’s Daughters: Solo Art Exhibition and Networking,

Jessica Libor, Da Vinci Art Alliance

Jessica Libor, Da Vinci Art Alliance

Enjoy original artwork and creative networking at this unique event.See Jessica Libor’s new pieces in her solo exhibition “Nature’s Daughters,” on view for one night only at the Da Vinci Art Alliance on Wednesday, September 4th from 5-8pm. Celebrate women with Jessica’s art and also with networking expert Jennifer Lynn Robinson. Men are also welcome to attend!

“I want to show the glamour of nature. Whenever I am outdoors in the wild, I feel the most beautiful and free. I don’t think I am alone in this experience. What I wanted to do was show this feeling visually. I want people to be swept away in a gorgeous fantasy of the absolute magic that nature weaves sometimes. I painted women because it felt like a natural expression of nature—like the earth, the feminine can have many sides to it, can bring forth new life, and often express their beauty by decorating themselves…something I am interested in drawing a correlation with.”

Jessica Libor graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2014 and has been painting, curating and writing since. Find out more at www.jessicalibor.com.

At 7 PM, Jessica will say a few words about the artwork, and Jennifer Lynn Robinson, Esquire of Purposeful Networking will provide her 5 best tips for women to network more strategically. You will also be able to ask Jennifer your networking questions one on one. Find out more at https://www.purposefulnetworking.com/.

There will be light bites and drinks provided. This event is free for all and open to the public! Registration is encouraged.

YOUNG AT ART 3, Off the Wall Gallery at Dirty Frank’s

Looking for an art show that’s a breath of fresh air? Perhaps one where the artists’ love of creativity shines through — no agenda, just passion? LOOK NO FARTHER.

THIS SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 1 to 4 PM, we will gather to welcome 22 very young artists to OFF THE WALL. They are the forces behind YOUNG AT ART 3, the newest edition of the occasional juried show we inaugurated in 2013.

Our Opening Reception will put a kid-centric twist on our normal light hors d’oeuvres — pizza, fruit salad and juice boxes, plus mini-cupcakes from our friends and neighbors at SWEET BOX — and you’ll have the chance to meet more than half the artists.

Our creatives run the gamut in age from 3-4 years old — AUGUST KILLE, STEFAN NAU and ORLA VECCHIO — up to 11 and 12 — including JAYDEN O’HALLORAN, MARY MINEI and YOUNG AT ART veterans KYLIE GROVE, MO HINCHEY-MODGLIN, SKYLAR WILLENBORG and EMI and NOA TRAVALIA.

The Travalia girls also remind us that this time around we’re showcasing sibling synergy with five such sets: EMI and NOA, ISE and SAJ EVANS MCNALLAN, DARIUS and STEFAN NAU, A.J. and SADIE PENNINGTON and CORMAC and ORLA VECCHIO.

Across their work — ranging from paintings and drawings in oil, acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil, charcoal and oil stick, to photography and collage to August’s whimsical sculpture, which takes flight in our 3D case — you witness SHEER JOY.

It buoys our firm belief that each and every person is BORN TO CREATE. The love of art and art-making is genuinely innate. Life erodes this instinct rather than reinforce it — unless we lift up an artist as early as possible.

So come join us as much to elevate as to celebrate. And if your party includes other kids, more power. Yes, normally you would be carded — but not for these three hours and a little bit more (unless you order alcohol). Let’s take in great art and have fun!See you Sunday,Togo

The Lives and Traumas of Stuffed Animals is a continuing series of prints and large graphite drawings of Lanie Doll and her friends that represent individuals and their emotional relationships with themselves and others. In recurring distressful situations, people often become like dolls, putting forward a cheerful personae no matter what is happening. The dolls encapsulate the personality of an individual and allows me to explore the inner workings of painful relationships without being immersed in the reality of difficult interactions. Although there is a playful side, the underlining theme is fear, cruelty, isolation, and survival. Though the situations represented are far from real, no stuffed animals were hurt in the making of the work, they capture the aura that surround people who on the outside appear happy while actually experiencing deep sorrow, loneliness, and tension in their daily lives.

ABOUT E. M. Erne

E. M. Erne, co-founder and co-director of Star Wheel Printers, received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA and a MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Erne’s drawings and prints have been featured in numerous invitational and juried national exhibitions. Erne has had six solo exhibitions in the past ten years: ‘Mr. Bunny Misses His Friends’, Nexus, Foundation for Today’s Arts, Philadelphia PA; ‘E. M. Erne: Drawing and Prints’, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ; ‘Mr. Bunny and Friends’, Nexus, Foundation for Today’s Arts, Philadelphia PA; ‘The Lives and Traumas of Stuffed Animals’, BahdeeBahdu Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; a ‘Wind Challenge Exhibition’, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA; and a ‘Community Gallery Solo Exhibition’, Abington Art Center, Abington, PA. Erne is a recipient of a Dene M. Louchheim Faculty Fellowship, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA, and a Career Development Fellowship with The Center for Emerging Visual Artist, Philadelphia, PA. Erne was one of 25 artists selected by the Center of Emerging Visual Artist to represent them in their 25th Year Anniversary Exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 2015 Erne won the Jane Friend Purchase Award in the Brand Associates’ 43rd Annual Works On Paper National Juried Exhibition in Glendale, CA. She is currently on the faculty at Drexel University, Moore College of Art and Design, and the Fleisher Art Memorial all in Philadelphia, PA.

Documenting objects with photography slowly transformed into its own artform with artists like Man Ray, Duchamp, Hans Bellmer, creating pieces which intertwined the two mediums. This exhibition at Gravy is titled; Beauties of the Common Tool, references Walker Evans’ famous portfolio of photographs of ordinary tools in the 1950’s. Today everyone used a new “common tool”; the photographic camera to document their lives and manipulate their world into art. While digital technology has created imagery only used on a screen; this exhibition hopes to explore ways photographers are using materiality, the body, textures, objects, and installation to create multi dimensional pieces which expand our definition of photography.

One theme throughout the work in this exhibition is the ability of the photographic objects to create multiple views for the viewer depending on the lighting and position of the pieces. Roxana Azar’s work is influenced by science fiction, plant intelli-gence, anxiety, and floral design. In the Projections in the Last Greenhouse series, botanical images from greenhouses and conservatories are applied to reflective and colorful surfaces that allow sunlight to pass through, creating shadowplay and reflections that shift and create vivid colorful shadows, fluorescence, and prisms depending on the angle and quality of light. They say, “I used to focus a lot on digital manipulation in my photographs, but now the materials I tend to use result in some sort of distortion and manipulation when viewing an image, whether it’s acrylic, mesh, or fabric. My fascination with these materials is that it shifts in color or shape as you move around it, so you’re never experiencing the surface in the same way.”

Glass artist, printmaker, and photographer; Jen Blazina creates ornate frames for her photographs of plaster sculptures set in nature. This installation titled Menagerie is a combination of cast glass frames, glass flowers, and dye sublimation photographs on metal. She says, “The photographs were taken from an ephemeral site-specific installation which I created for Djerassi Artist Residency in Woodside, CA. As a little girl, the forest and animals entranced me. Having grown up in a city, the forest seemed like a magical place where fairy tales came alive. Menagerie alludes to a dream like memory by using my sculpture in my photography and the elegance of glass baroque styled frames embellished with wild flowers.

Beauties of the Common Tool, gravy. Studio, Philadelphia Photography

In the collaborative works between Will Douglas and Matthew Drennan Wicks, the physical process of manipulating porcelain is fused with the digital process of image making. The flat, hand-built surface of a vessel becomes a screen for image on which to present a photographic image. The work vacillates between three- dimensional and two-dimensional space as both image and object work together to create tension. The artists are interested in the commercial and mass reproducibility of both images and objects; the hand-built vessel pushes against the immediacy of digital imaging. Establishing a new relationship between the two drives the traditional conventions of both materials into a new dialogue about the consumption of images and the viewing of objects.

Created during a 2017 residency at a recycling center in Northeast Philadelphia, Maria Möller’s project One Last Time is a lens-based meditation on mortality, joy, and second chances. She developed a visual narrative that compares life cycles with waste cycles, salvaging six objects from Revolution Recovery and pairing each with a person in her life who is living in an especially close proximity to their own mortality. Working collaboratively with each participant, she staged a photo shoot during which the discarded object could fulfill its purpose “one last time.” After this shoot, another took place when the participant traveled to the recycling center and returned their object to the waste stream.

The images included in this exhibition by Cecilia Paredes are reminiscent of surrealist imagery while her use of pattern and color reveal her ties to Peruvian culture and visual vernacular of womanhood. Paredes composes these photographs by selecting a patterned ground, such as floral wallpaper, and intricately paints her skin to match. Paredes says about her work, “Part of what makes us human is our ability to see beyond the narrow door through which we enter the world—to grow beyond the culture of our birth by recognizing other cultures, other patterns of life. Yet our birth culture is always imprinted upon us; the mystery of identity is never fully resolved. We are always from a time and place to which we can never return”

Makeba “Keebs” Rainey also uses the body, textures, and color to create photographic collages which are printed on fabric. The piece in this exhibit is titled ‘Souls of Philly: London’ where the artist uses collage and statements from the subjects to share insights into her community with the audience. Rainey’s creative practice focuses on building community and what that looks like. For her, community is an extension of family. By centering her work around social justice, specifically in regard to Black Americans, community becomes the key to liberation. Her artwork taps into aspects of the Black community, merging the old with the new by re-envisioning the ancestors through new media and creating space for young creatives to build and sustain themselves.